.net and vxipnp drivers

[Sergei]

What are National Instruments' plans for implementing VXIPNP with the .NET?
I heard that National Instruments' has the wizard whith should conver the vxipnp driver to the .net class, isnt it?

[Glenn Burnside]

Sergei,
The VxiPnP Consortium (now a part of the IVI Foundation) has not defined requirements for VxiPnP drivers for .NET languages. However, Measurement Studio 7.1 includes a .NET Instrument Driver Wizard, which you can use to create a wrapper class for an instrument driver, given a function panel and header file. The Measurement Studio help topic "Calling Instrument Drivers from .NET Languages" can give you some directions on how to get started using the wizard.
Please note that the wizard does not translate the existing driver into .NET code - it creates a wrapper around the driver's .dll, so that you can use the driver from either C# or VB.NET.
I'm interested to learn more about what you would like to be able to do in .NET regarding instr
ument communication. Have you used the VISA or Ni4882 .NET API's? If so, did they meet your application's needs? In what scenarios do you need an instrument driver for .NET languages, and what kind of API would you expect it to have? This kind of information can be very useful to us in evaluating future support for instrument drivers in future versions of Measurement Studio.

- Glenn

[Sergei]

Glenn,

Yes, We have used the VISA and Ni4882 .NET API's.
However we would like to use VxiPnP drivers in .NET,
because it is easy operating way to communicate with instruments over the driver functions that sending commands by using the niVISA or Ni4882 .NET API's.

Is it possibly to use a .NET Instrument Driver Wizard with NI Measuremen Studio 7.0?

[Glenn Burnside]

The Instrument Driver Wizard was released after Measurement Studio 7.0 as a standalone executable available by request from the Measurement Studio web page. With the release of Measurement Studio 7.1, in addition to some small code generation fixes, we integrated the driver wizard into the Visual Studio IDE, and removed the download request for the standalone executable from the web site. If you are not planning to upgrade to 7.1 yet, you can still request a copy of the standalone executable here.